Bearwhale Sells Ten Million XRP, 800 Million XRP Sold So Far in 2018, 200 Million Left

An XRP account, which once had some 1.08 billion XRP, has sold another ten million today according to unverified reports, worth circa $5 million.

An XRP veteran compiled the movements of this account now dubbed the Ripple bearwhale, with the above featured image showing their sale for much of this year.

“The BearWhale has about 340 million XRP remaining. At current rate, the dump should complete by the end of April,” he said back in March.

It appears however that only an additional 100 million was sold up to April. Another 30 million was sold during the recent bottom in April, with 10 million XRP sold today according to an updated report.

“I simply tracked the sum of XRP balances on these accounts (they are not exchanging any IOUs on the XRPL anyway). The XRP are being moved, several millions at a time, into a few accounts on Bitstamp and Bitfinex,” the XRP veteran said on March 21st.

There is much speculation as to who owns this account which was activated in November 2015. Naturally, the first name to come to mind is Jed McCaleb, the founder of Ripple who had a fall out.

He, however, has an agreement with Ripple, the company, to sell his holdings slowly, rather than as was done here with about half a billion XRP ($250 million) sold in three months up to March.

Some are pointing to this account as the cause of today’s price fall in XRP by around 4% while bitcoin and eth is slightly up.

However, there may also be concerns regarding SEC’s determination of XRP’s status. The Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC) has stated that bitcoin and eth are not securities, but has not yet clarified how they classify XRP.

In a recent statement, SEC’s Director of Corporate Finance, William Hinman, said the level of decentralization is determinative of whether an asset is or is not a security.

XRP, thus, is trying to become more decentralized by adding new node validators. Ripple Labs, however, currently still runs 57% of them according to a tracking website, with other entities running only 12 out of 21 XRP nodes.

Yet there are no indications that SEC plans to make any statement on XRP as far as we are aware, but the lack of clarity regarding its classification might be causing some uncertainty.